Young guns draw sound, style from classic country roots - Entertainment, Music - Army Times

Young guns draw sound, style from classic country roots

When Justin Townes Earle stepped onto the Grand Ole Opry stage last May, he and his band were dressed like they’d been waiting in the wings for the past 50 years. With Brylcreem-ed hair, a black suit and ribbon tie around his neck, Earle stepped up to the WSM microphone and launched into “Hard Livin’,” a double-time ditty as sharp and straight as his wardrobe.

“Every move you make is cold as ice/ Every word you say is just downright uncalled for, baby, low and cruel,” he sang. “Come on honey, don’t you make me choose/ ‘Cause it’s hard livin’ lovin’ you.”

“The old folks loved us,” Earle recalls. “I made the conscious effort to (dress up), because I don’t think that there’s anything more shameful in the world than putting your boots in the same box that Hank Williams did in blue jeans and a T-shirt. That (stuff) is shameful.”

Earle, 27, is one of a growing number of young artists drawing inspiration from classic country, folk and roots music, idolizing long-departed performers and wearing out records — yes, actual records — that first hit airwaves some 50 years ago.

Before he recently relocated to New York, Earle, a native Nashvillian, could count a number of local acts among his peers, including all-girl country/rockabilly trio Those Darlins and singer-songwriter Caitlin Rose. Each act is reverent and modern in its own way, tipping a hat to Nashville’s musical legacy while pushing the scene in fresh directions.

‘The real thing’

Today, Earle, son of revered folk-rocker Steve Earle, releases his second album, “Midnight at the Movies.” While the stacked harmonies and washboard rhythms of “Walk Out” show him further sharpening his knack for catchy, ‘50s-era numbers, the album also branches out to include shades of bluegrass, blues and contemporary Americana.

“If you were born here, you’ve had access to everything from people like Guy Clark and even up to Elvis Costello,” Earle explains. “You can run across anybody in this town really easily. You also have the advantage of being really close to Memphis, really close to the Mississippi Delta, and really close to North Carolina. You’re right in the middle of where every single bit of American music came from. You have an advantage — if you look for it, you can see the real thing. That stuff’s really important.”

Jessi Darlin of Those Darlins was exposed to country music at an early age; her grandfather was a musician and taught her how to play guitar. But it was another Nashville-area musician who inspired her to seek out older music: rocker Jack White of White Stripes/Raconteurs fame.

“I read an interview with him, and he was saying that when he was young, he listened to Led Zeppelin,” she says. “He always thought they were so awesome, but then one day, somebody told him that their influences were really more important. So he started searching and finding all this great stuff, like early blues, and then started delving even further. I started thinking about that concept and started trying to find out more about early music and the history of rock ‘n’ roll.”

That searching led Darlin to the Carter Family, and the history of that group — country matriarchs Mother Maybelle Carter and Sara Dougherty in particular — intrigued her.

“I got their CD, and from the first couple of notes, I was floored and heard it in a new way that I’d never heard country music before,” she says. “After a while, I started thinking, ‘Man, if I could have seen myself five years ago, listening to all this country music, I would have thought I was such a nerd.’ ”

Three chords and a good hook

You wouldn’t call the crowd at Wanda Jackson’s most recent Nashville concert nerds. In February, the Queen of Rockabilly performed at the 5 Spot, an East Nashville club that usually caters to Nashville’s indie-rock scene. (Those Darlins were her opening act.)

The predominance of 20-somethings at the concert may have surprised older audience members. Where had these kids heard “Fujiyama Mama” or “Mean, Mean Man”?

“The Internet is completely responsible for this,” Earle says. “Young people today are very smart, and they’re figuring out where the bodies are buried, just like they did in the ‘60s when the folk scare came around. It’s kind of happening all over again. Acoustic guitars and harmonica racks are cool again.”

Those Darlins’ Kelley Darlin, for her part, loves to dig up video footage of old blues and folk artists on YouTube.

“Before that, no matter how interested you were, it was incredibly time-consuming to go to a library to find that kind of footage,” she says.

Personality and performance

For “Cowboy” Anton Garcia, who hosts Music City U.S.A. on Vanderbilt student radio station WRVU with his fiancée, “Cowgirl” Erin Svinka, classic country prominently displays something else that’s often missing in modern music: the personality of the singers.

“If you hear a Hank Williams record or a Faron Young record, you know the difference from the very beginning,” Garcia says. “I find it hard to tell the difference between country artists today.”

The unique draw of country’s colorful forebears isn’t lost on Rose, whose 2008 EP Dead Flowers included a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray.” To the 21-year-old singer, though, it goes beyond history.

“I think the best part about it is that people can find actual idols in country music still,” she says. “I don’t think it’s been until the last 10 years that country music has sort of lost its icons.”

But as modern artists attempt to capture that iconography, there’s a risk of seeming like a parody act. Earle, Those Darlins and Rose all admit that there’s an element of kitsch in performing classic country in 2009 — an element that needs to be handled delicately.

“I think some people don’t write about their surroundings well enough,” Earle says. “And then especially when they try to pull out the banjos and singing with a Southern accent, they really start (embarrassing themselves). Your slip will show.”

If novelty’s a part of the act, it may as well count toward putting on a reliably entertaining show, a value held in high esteem by all three acts.

“Hank Williams’ music was heavy,” Kelley Darlin says, “but he also had one of the best senses of humor.”

To Earle, it comes down to a focus on delivering a real performance.

“There was a professional thing about the way that those guys performed on the Opry,” he says. “No matter how drunk or depressed you were, you put your suit on, buttoned your shirt up, combed your hair and walked out onstage and you smiled. You put on the same show for everybody. That’s something that’s been lost.”